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Everything posted by Bauglir

I can't imagine how this could be relevant, but have you tried in another emulator? I'd recommend higan or snes9x. ZSNES uses a lot of weird hacks to make up for a lack of hardware-accurate emulation, and testing another emulator will make sure it's not just one of those failing to play nice with a change BNW made. If you're using an external gamepad instead of your keyboard, also give the keyboard a try.

BTB has insisted that I produce a patch containing an alternate Dadaluma, edited to resemble that legendary scourge of Skyrim, Macho Man Randy Savage. I'm a lazy bastard who doesn't currently have access to the ROM or any familiarity at all with patchmaking, so instead here's the image, along with a thread for people to post relevant images or patches in. If somebody could go ahead and turn this picture into a patch, that'd be Lumbergh.

Couple others. It's been a couple years since I actually did them, but I don't think I ever posted them here. Probably will need some tweaking to function in-game, not to mention some serious changes to the plot. These ones are double-size, so you'll need to shrink them too.

Look, I'll tl;dr the general response you've been getting for you, but even condensed it's gonna be a couple paragraphs.
Being time-invested, nice, and intelligent is neither sufficient nor necessary for being treated well here. Helpful, to-the-point content of speech is generally appreciated. These things help, but you can be a lazy, unfriendly moron and still be popular. Look at Nowea, for example. Respect for others and for established social dynamics, whether they're in a position of authority or not, is necessary, at least. This is true of every social group.
You are arrogant. Your speech is neither helpful nor to-the-point. You are, at best, superficially polite.
You cannot reason your way out of that characterization. It is a subjective opinion, and it was one I was hesitant to form (for instance, I upvoted several of your earlier posts just to counter the dogpile of negative rep a little). But it's an opinion that seems to be popular. It's one that can be changed just as it was formed - slowly, and by demonstration, not by argument.

By "problem", I mean the issue that you can't proceed without grinding. If you had known about the cap, the extra SP you would have had might have been enough to make the difference, and that's all well and good, but the fundamental issue I'm trying to point out is that you're criticizing the game for being inconvenient, when you've chosen to deny yourself the conveniences that can be gained by fighting occasional random encounters. If convenience were something you really cared about, you shouldn't have done a challenge run. If the challenge is something you really cared about, then these inconveniences are a natural part of it, including the fact that you couldn't have been aware of some of the mechanics without advance experience. That's why people who do challenge runs successfully usually play through normally once, to explore the game, test its functionality, and get a feel for what is or is not supported.
Pointing out version mismatches and that sort of thing is useful, and thank you for doing that. Stuff like pause vs. ellipsis is a matter of taste, since I believe they both take the same amount of space in the dialogue banks, but it's fine to voice your opinion. Those kinds of comments are the ones nobody's addressing because nobody has any feelings on them one way or the other. They would both be likelier to be seen if they were clearly separated from your opinions that are influenced by your choice of run, like whether or not there's a Monster-In-A-Box in the collapsing house in Tzen.
The changes you made include the cheat codes you used - if you're not aware, those work by altering the game's data. They're functionally equivalent to very small patches, and do not take advantage of any functionality that's actually built into the game. The only difference between them and something like Bob New Ross is scale and some technical details.
PS. Why do you ask?

Okay, but doing things optimally involves fighting random battles, unless you can explain why the no-random-battles restriction is contributing to some other goal. That's the part you can't possibly be an unbiased observer about, because it's something profoundly weird, which you chose to do, and which is the fundamental root of your problem. It's not purity - we had some guy who edited every character to be Relm for silly reasons, and we loved Final Fantasy 6: Bob New Ross. If you can change the game to make it better, that's great and you should absolutely do it.
The problem is that the changes you made and the criticisms you have are all based around balancing your challenge run. That challenge run isn't something BNW did. It's something you brought to the table. You're absolutely right that BNW is a poor fit for a no-random-battles run. But why shouldn't it be a poor fit? The facts and evidence you've provided make a fantastic case for not doing this kind of run. They say nothing useful about how BNW could be better at what it's trying to be.

Then why are you doing a challenge run? Your behavior doesn't match up with your stated goals. "I don't want to waste time, so I'm going to try and game the AI to proceed"; "I'm going to play the game as it's designed, so I'm going to apply hex edits, which are literally and exactly what cheat codes do"; "I don't want to have to look up detailed data on what attacks do, so I'm going to put myself in a position where I need to do exactly that in order to plan out my battles adequately". What's your actual desired outcome, here? And how are your actual actions contributing to it or hindering it?
In a well-balanced JRPG, a no-random-battles run is not a baseline for the game's difficulty. Period. It's possible in vanilla by exploiting loopholes and bugs that BNW has rightly closed. This is not the same thing as a no-grinding run. If you simply fight every random encounter you run into, you will likely wind up slightly overleveled. The game's random encounter rate is not absurd, and more to the point the AI for those battles has been so reworked that it's a significant part of the mod's value. Skipping them when you're trying to evaluate the game is like loading up a save before the final battle with Kefka, and complaining about the consequences it has on your playthrough is like proceeding to complain that none of the characters had any development or even an introduction (because you skipped all of it).
When you try to dig a well using a taxidermied squirrel as your only tool, you will inevitably have problems. True, it may be inconvenient that the dirt is so heavy. It may be frustrating that the squirrel's stuffing renders it flexible and a poor source of leverage. But none of those things are truly to blame for your predicament - the choices that brought you to this point were not sensible ones, and nobody is going to come help save you from their inevitable, obvious consequences.

Kudos on getting so far when you made your first run a challenge run, but I think you've run into why you shouldn't have done that. Challenge runs like LLGs are best-suited to people who know the game inside and out, and the things you learned from vanilla don't necessarily carry over. You have to start that learning process again, and that's part of what appeals to people who like figuring out how to make those runs - it gives them something fresh to work on. The game's been beaten with levels so low Gogo joined with 0 HP, leading to hijinks, so it's not impossible. It just takes a ridiculous level of dedication and familiarity.
One thing I think you should keep in mind is that some of the things you call wrong or in need of fixing are intentional. You should adjust your expectations to include the possibility that some of the assumptions that vanilla has trained you to have may not apply anymore, because they were holding the game back. For instance, the levels at which characters join and rejoin has been deliberately altered from vanilla, and most people agree it's an improvement.

So one of the admins said "start a thread" re: the recent change to the Discord rules that prohibit outright pornography (defined as images containing genitals or breasts) in the NSFW channel. So I'm doing that.
My perspective is that it was a useful channel have for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, you're having a conversation in another channel where something very NSFW comes up; in those cases, the channel can serve as a useful way to carry on that conversation without stifling anybody, while at the same time giving people the ability to manage the content they have to deal with. The other thing is that there were some conversations that were inherently unsafe for life, but fun to have, even if you couldn't accept shitting up other channels with them. Dr. Letha's contributions to the channel are a good example of this - they were fucking hilarious examples of pornography gone wrong. I don't think anybody actually masturbated to them, but being able to see them posted has improved my life.
I don't think we should encourage any of our Discord channels to be environments where you go to have a fap or a schlick. But I also don't think that's what the channel was really used for, anyway. Aside from one guy who was banned for his abuse of the channel, anyway. New rules aren't a good way to keep that kind of culture in place. Cultural pressure is. I'd rather have a general understanding that it's cool for people, mods or not, to tell people to stop shitting up a channel with something that isn't in the spirit of things, and get backed up by mods if it doesn't stop (and the mods turn out to agree). It'd be healthier for the community if we all learned that continuing to knowingly piss other people off isn't acceptable, even if it's by doing something that's technically allowed. Let's not let trolls claim "I'm not touching you!"
That said, turning off automatic embedding in NSFW would be a good idea. I've got no problems with that. Not everybody wants to see Letha's carnival show of body horror but I think we can all cope knowing it's there. But seriously turn it back on in general, I'm not sure why that was disabled.
I'm not making a poll because this isn't a democracy - make an argument and maybe you'll convince somebody with it, but I don't think weight of numbers is likely to do it on this one.
EDIT: Oh hey, apparently this worked. If you're the sort of person who just reads OP and responds, the status quo is restored, but remember - don't be a shitheel about it. Keep your porn collection between you and your preferred image board.

I think you've identified the problem correctly, but I'm not sure I think your solution is best. There's been some conversation on the Discord, and I've been convinced it's probably the best balance of effectiveness to practicality-to-implement, but I'd still rather shoot for a revision that makes makes some of the following changes:
1. Drawing can fail completely, but as long as you succeed you draw a minimum of between 10 and 25 of a spell.
2. Junctions provide a percentage bonus rather than an additive one, so that junctioning 100 of the best possible spell can still only double a stat.
3. Spell stock provides diminishing returns, so that 80% of the benefit is applied at 20 of a spell in stock.
What I like about how this interacts with the Draw system is that it makes it easy to get reckless with using a spell that's easily available. It also doesn't punish you for using rare spells in a pinch, because a few uses have basically no effect - it's only when you let yourself start running out, because you use a spell too regularly, that you start taking meaningful stat penalties. I could see trimming the stock cap down to 50ish, just because the 60 or so casts of a spell that are almost consequence-free can last most of the game, though.
One thought that just occurred to me - what if spell stock decayed over time somehow for folks who don't regularly cast spells? It could be a balancing factor between mages (who risk eroding their stats by using their most potent abilities) and physical attackers, but I could also see it getting annoying. It'd definitely be a pain in the ass to implement, but I'd be interested to know thoughts on the matter.
Minor subthought - the game has a sliding elemental system, so would be it be at all interesting to make higher-tier elemental spells more elemental? So say that the Fire spell is only considered 25% Fire elemental, so it only gets a 1.25 multiplier in situations where Firaga gets a 2.0 multiplier.

If there were room, a fight against a non-Esper Leviathan with a Doomgaze-like mechanic in which the creature flees in the first several encounters would be a reasonable thing to put in; failing that, maybe move Blue-D to a Phunbaba-like encounter where the party needs to fend it off, in order to introduce the dragons, and something else interesting might go in the bottom of the Ancient Castle? You'd need dialogue explaining how there's some way of getting from the ocean to the Ancient Castle if you just had Blue-D flee there, and there's no room for that either. This is just spitballing, but while the QoL improvement would be nice, there's no room for an extra sprite (so it'd have to use an existing enemy) and there's no room in the event bank, I think, so it's a moot question.

Sure.
The mod introduces a stat growth system. Sources are removed from most of the game, so this new system is the only way to improve a character's base stats (Strength, Vitality, etc.). As you fight, you'll accumulate points that can be spent to give characters a pile of Sources that only they can use - each time you do this, you'll have a choice of one of several ways to distribute them. Since each character has their own list of options, some characters are naturally better to some roles than others; but since each character has several options, and you can choose a new one every time you do this, there's customization.
Characters also have unique passive abilities to help differentiate them. Some have modes that you can influence (Barrett, for instance, gets different bonuses depending on which row he's in), but generally this is more for helping the characters be different than customizable.
Equipment now has large effects on stats, and most characters have access to mutually exclusive options, meaning that you'll spend more time figuring out which piece of armor or which weapon is best for the role you're having a character serve than picking up the next step in a linear sequence of upgrades.
Attack and magic damage have been balanced to bring them more in line with one another, and materia's stat influence is played up more.
For more technical and detailed info, download the mod and see the readme. I think I'd just be repeating it if I get any deeper.

Those two things are specifically addressed as the core focus of the mod. Characters are differentiated by their available stat growth, passive special abilities, and more diverse equipment. Stat growth and equipment each have choices you have to make in order to nail down which of several niches you want a given character to fill, and materia other than pure magic are extremely valuable - my most powerful character was a Tifa who punched things and counterattacked a lot, and by the end of the game I was actually disappointed when she got a Limit Break because it meant her damage output went down for reasons that are too arcane and spoilery to get into here.

Re: Sephiroth
Bizarro took some effort because I didn't walk in there prepared for 3 parties, because I'm an idiot. Safer got roflstomped by Tifa, who, as I recall, got two rounds of quad-quad-9s in before he started flying high and got pasted by quad-Bahamut ZEROs. Didn't even have time to become a Starfucker (incidentally, I'd like to petition you to rename Supernova to "Starfucker Supreme"). The Hero Medal challenge afterward was also fairly easy once I accounted for the negative status spam, though I did lose the first time as Cloud was not wearing adequate protective gear going in. Those bosses are pretty much trivial for a party that can handle the superbosses, but that's probably just part of the genre. I never faced them with an ordinary party, so I can't speak to the challenge level along that line.

Sabin, because there's no party he can't improve and no fight in which he can't contribute, as of several versions ago when I last played. He hits like a tank, tanks like a truck, inflicts valuable status ailments, uses Golem... what's not to like?

I do agree with the slog argument - there are a lot of bosses that require you to figure out the pattern and then repeat it a bunch in order to win. You do generally want to require a little repetition in case the first time was a fluke, but in bosses that don't have obvious phase changes like the Powersoul Keeper or Dyne, it can get to be annoying. If you can figure out what the accelerated summon animation mod does, maybe incorporating that in a way that's compatible with the Ruby Weapon fight would help? Once you've got that QoL change, it's easier to justify toning down the HP damage that summons do.

So this is happening. Test post to see how the avatar renders against this background - the hazards of using transparency. I like lots of things the folks running this place are responsible for, including this place.

I always liked "What is the other square root of -1?" but almost nobody knows that it's j. Instructions are good - "Type qwertyuiop backward" isn't trivial for a spambot to parse. The fact that, as I recall, you've hooked it into Google's captcha helps a lot as well.